Wide Angle PDF Converter

After becoming the de facto standard for document interchange, PDF has become the last challenge when it comes to conversion of documents. Wide Angle PDF Converter offers you one-click features that convert PDF files into Office formats, EPUB, HTML, TXT, and image files, as well as useful editing tools to append and merge PDF files, extract and insert pages, export images, etc.

Wide Angle PDF Converter is one of the many attempts to transform a closed document standard developed for printing houses and publishers into editable files that anyone can modify and re-use. And, as it happens with all its predecessors and current competitors, the results are, at best, mixed. On one hand, there is no way of converting a document designed to “look nice” into a file that a text-based processing tool can work with in a natural way. On the other hand, unless you take a snapshot of one of its pages and save it as an image file, there is no way that a word processor could reproduce the layout of a file whose layout is purely graphical. And that is why Wide Angle PDF Converter finds so many difficulties in providing converted PDF files that resemble the original in terms of both layout and structure. The text is usually there – in most cases – but an 11-page PDF file soon becomes a 19-page Word file full of blank spaces where the images should be, meaningless tables and decorations, and an alarming lack of logical structure. And that is if you choose DOC as the output format - if you go for the DOCX format, the results are even more discouraging.

This is not criticism – Wide Angle PDF Converter is simply trying to achieve the impossible, and that is something that is worth acknowledging because converting a PDF file into a Word-compatible one is like viewing an image file using a Hex editor. Other formats yield better results, though – conversion to HTML produces near-perfect results; EPUB captures all text and somehow formats it in the right way, but tends to leave out images; PowerPoint presentations have some problems with text blocks, but they can be easily reformatted; TXT has no problems in rendering perfect text files as the layout is completely ignored, and images are still the best option for those who don’t want to lose anything of the original layout and couldn’t care less about editing the content.

If you want to modify your original PDF before conversion, Wide Angle PDF Converter comes with an excellent set of editing tools that will let you merge and append PDF files, split them into smaller files or extract specific pages into new PDFs, select a block of text and export it as plain text, export any images contained in the PDF document, rotate its orientation, and add bookmarks and attachments to your favorite snippets. You can also protect your PDFs by applying watermarks to their pages or by tweaking their various permissions and locking their content with a password.

The program comes in a modern ribbon-based interface that will remind you very strongly of the latest Office tools, making you feel at home right from the start. Conversion processes are not precisely fast, which tells a lot about Wide Angle PDF Converter’s strenuous efforts in providing you with the best possible conversion outcome. Despite that, and unless the original PDF is mostly text with a very basic layout, be prepared for a laborious post-editing task.